In order to improve the quality of systematic researches, various tools have been developed by well-known scientific institutes sporadically. Dr. Nader Ale Ebrahim has collected these sporadic tools under one roof in a collection named “Research Tool Box”. The toolbox contains over 720 tools so far, classified in 4 main categories: Literature-review, Writing a paper, Targeting suitable journals, as well as Enhancing visibility and impact factor.

University of Malaya (UM) - Department of
Engineering Design and Manufacture, Faculty of EngineeringUniversity of
Malaya (UM) - Research Support Unit, Centre of Research Services,
Institute of Research Management and Monitoring (IPPP), Islamic Azad
University, Najafabad Branch, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia - Faculty
of Education, Islamic Azad University (IAU) - Department of Agriculture,
University of Malaya (UM), National University of Malaysia, National
University of Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)

Do you know what your Kardashian index score is? If not, you should work it out now, according to a paper by Neil Hall, professor of functional and comparative genomics at the University of Liverpool.

Professor
Hall’s measure takes its name from Kim Kardashian, the US television
personality who, he says, is famous simply for being famous rather than
for any discernible talent or skill.

“You could say that her
celebrity buys success, which buys greater celebrity,” he writes in the
paper, titled “The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social
media profile for scientists” and published in the journal Genome Biology.
“Her fame has meant that comments by Kardashian on issues such as Syria
have been widely reported in the press. Sadly, her interjection on the
crisis has not yet led to a let-up in the violence,” Professor Hall
writes.

He believes that there are parallels to be drawn in
academia and, specifically, science. “I think it is possible that there
are individuals who are famous for being famous (or, to put it in
science jargon, renowned for being renowned),” he writes. “We are all
aware that certain people are seemingly invited as keynote speakers, not
because of their contributions to the published literature but because
of who they are.

“In the age of social media there are people who
have high-profile scientific blogs or Twitter feeds but have not
actually published many peer-reviewed papers of significance; in
essence, scientists who are seen as leaders in their field simply
because of their notoriety.”

To explore his theory, Professor Hall
plotted the number of Twitter followers a scientist had against the
number of scientific citations they had received to calculate their
Kardashian index score. Those individuals with a highly over-inflated
number of followers (compared with the number that would be expected)
are the Kardashians.

“Social media make it very easy for people to
build a seemingly impressive persona by essentially ‘shouting louder’
than others,” he says. “I propose that all scientists calculate their
own K-index on an annual basis and include it in their Twitter profile.”

Not
only will this help others decide how much weight they should give to
these scholars’ tweets, he writes, but it might also incentivise those
who are high up the K-index to “get off Twitter and write those papers”.

“Interestingly,
in my analysis, very few women (only one in fact) had a highly inflated
Twitter following, while most (11/14) had fewer followers than would be
expected,” he adds. “Hence, most Kardashians are men!”

The study
“does not prove that we, as a community, are continuing to ignore
women”, or that women are “less likely to engage in self-promotion”, he
says, but it is consistent with either or both of these scenarios.

“I
don’t blame Kim Kardashian or her science equivalents for exploiting
their fame; who wouldn’t?” Professor Hall concludes. “However, I think
it’s time that we develop a metric that will clearly indicate if a
scientist has an overblown public profile so that we can adjust our
expectations of them accordingly.”

English abstract

Measuring the
number of papers which are published each year, publication
productivity is the factor which shows the reputation of universities
and countries. However, the effect of growing economy and using internet
on the publication productivity in Asian countries has not been
discovered yet. The present research is going to figure out the
publication productivity among the elite universities in Asian countries
and also ten top universities around the world in the last twenty years
(from 1993 to 2012). Furthermore, the current research is aimed to
study the relationship among publication, gross domestic product (GDP)
and internet usage. It is worth to mention that the publication of the
top Ten Malaysian Universities was regarded for the similar period of
time. To get the exact numbers of documents like papers, conference
articles, review papers and letters which are published by the
universities in the last twenty years, the writer of the same paper used
the Science Direct database. Moreover, the data for GDP and the number
of internet usage was collected through the World Bank database (World
Data Bank).To compare all kinds of publications,one-way ANOVA was used
and to investigate the impact of economic growth and internet usage on
publication productivity, multiple regression analysis was applied.The
results showed that the rate of publication growth was 1.9, 20.9, and
65.5 in top universities in the world, ASEAN countries and Malaysia,
respectively.The results also showed that there was a positive and
significant correlation between GDP and the number of internet users
with the number of publications in ASEAN and Malaysian universities.
Internet usage had much more influence in comparison with the GDP in
predicting the number of publications among these groups except for top
ten Malaysian universities from 2003 to 2012. In summary, publication
trends in top ten Malaysian and ASEAN universities are promising.
However, policy makers and science managers should spend much more
percentage of their GDP on Internet facilities and research studies that
their outputs lead to more rapid economic growth and internet usage.

15.
Meho, L.I. and K.M. Spurgin, Ranking the research productivity of lis
faculty and schools: An evaluation of data sources and research methods.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
56.

Understand Google Scholar

Google Scholar indexes
scholarly material from proprietary sources such as subscription
journals and grey literature from the open web. It can be easier to
search there than to go into several different databases.

Soon after your article is published, Google Scholar will see it.
Here is what’s known of how Google Scholar decides its search rankings,
and why your article ends up where it does in the results:

Words in the title are weighted heavily.

It relies heavily on citation counts. The more an article has been cited, the higher it ranks.

However, recent articles are weighted more than older ones. This helps counter the effect of citation counts.

Journal name and author names also count for a lot.

Words in bitmapped graphics (such as JPEGs and PNGs) are not
indexed. Use vector graphics and plain text (e.g. for captions) so that
Google Scholar can read the words.

Google Scholar does not seem to base its rankings on the frequency of a search term in an article.

Multiple versions of an article, (e.g. on your home page and in
YorkSpace) will be grouped together. Preprints, postprints and final
journal copies are also grouped.

Put it in YorkSpace

Google Scholar knows that YorkSpace is the institutional repository at a research university. It gives high weight to articles stored there. The YorkSpace Deposit Toolkit explains everything you need to know to add your work, with instructional guides, videos and documentation

University of Malaya (UM) - Department of
Engineering Design and Manufacture, Faculty of EngineeringUniversity of
Malaya (UM) - Research Support Unit, Centre of Research Services,
Institute of Research Management and Monitoring (IPPP), Islamic Azad
University, Najafabad Branch, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia - Faculty
of Education, Islamic Azad University (IAU) - Department of Agriculture,
University of Malaya (UM), National University of Malaysia, National
University of Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)

Social
network sites seem to come in at least 4 different flavors: site that
offer tools to manage your references, tools to increase your online
presence and ease networking, tools to exchange and engage in new
collaborations and more site that are specialized in specific scientific
fields. Keep in mind that this classification is not exclusive since
all have overlapping functionalities.

There are probably many more out there. Please feel free to comment or contact me if you know of any that are not listed here.

III – Sharing Science (data, figures, code, samples…) -

One important aspect of the open science movement,
is making your research always more accessible. This means thinking of
new ways to communique scientific research, and online tools to share
scientific related materials will certainly. So brows bellow and share
away!

Research laboratories can
be organizational mess when it comes to ordering, inventory, recording
of experimental data or equipment management. Luckily there’s an
increasing collection of great online tools out there that helps you
manage a lab. Here’s a few, some of which will be featured by a blog
post in the upcoming weeks:

LabGuru - One of the most comprehensive web-based lab and research management tool. Free for personal use.

There’s a lot of great tools out there
that can help you produce great research, from analyzing data, to
writing and publishing your scientific papers. More and more tools will
also focus on helping you communicate your research through new media,
mostly online (blog, twitter, open source, paper repository…)

Working with data:

Plot.ly – Online tool to analyze data, plot beautiful graphs and share all of that with the world.

Runmycode - Allows
you to create a companion website for your publication. The site can
host a cloud-based version of your code that users can run at will. (blog post)

Measuring your impact:
The good old citation number has been the standard metric for impact
for years. How do you know how impactful your research is in the
research 2.0 era? These services provide a new evalutation of research,
in part by considering the online ecosystem. This alternative metrics
has been named “Article Level Metrics” or “Altmetrics” (alternative
metric).

ScienceCard - Early altmetric software (development on hold at the moment)

VI – Find expertise -

Whether it’s a biology lab needs to find a
software engineer, or a chemistry lab that needs to access to the latest
mass spectrometry instruments and analysis, a whole range of online
services have emerged these past years help you connect to experts and
expertise.

ScienceExchange - “An eBay for science” says nature.com. This service helps researchers find and use shared equipment facilities around the US.

Assaydepot - A network of both public and private research services exchange.

Zombal - A
scientific freelancer platform Deposit request for research project to
be done, or come find a job and “transform your scientific expertise
into cash”.

1degreebio - Find independent review on life science products and service provider

Direct2experts - An impressive directory of experts from biomedical institutions around the USA.

Biomedexperts - Connects biomedical researchers throughout the world through networks of co-authors.

EvidenceFinder - Search engine that digs deep into the full text of articles to find facts related to your search queries. (blog post)

Google Scholar - Beyond being a great publication search engine like other (pubmed, scifinder, Scirus…), google scholar also implemented researcher profiles and publication suggestions based on your interrest.

Pushpin -
This service includes a classic social network interface, with
profiles, publication list but also makes recommendations regarding who
you should follow and what papers might be interesting to you. (blog post)

Pubget – Search engine for life science PDFs. Pubget finds and displays the PDFs directly in its interface.

PubChase, a tool to search, organize, store pdf, and discover biomedical research both in browser and mobile. (blog post)

ReadCube,
is platform that helps you organize, find new paper and manage your
pdfs. It also includes a pdf reader with enriched content (including
links to references, altmetric data and much more)

ScienceGist, is a platform that allows users to transcribe the abstracts of top scientific papers in simplified english. (blog post)

Scizzle, an aggregator for scientific articles to easily organize, share and collaborate through an user-friendly and clean look. (blog post)

Peer Evaluation -
Allows authors to upload data, articles and media and have them openly
accessible and available for review and discussion by peers.

Peerage of Science -
Has the particularity of bridging the independent peer-review process
with direct access to publishing in partner journals if successful with
review process.

Paper Critics - Connects to Mendeley accounts, this tool offers researchers to give and receive feedback about their scientific production.

Libre - Participative reviewing platform. This tool is not launched just yet, so be on the lookout for updates.

LazyScholar - Chrome extension that saves time when looking for the full texts of scientific papers. (blog post)

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About Me

Nader Ale Ebrahim has
a Technology Management PhD degree from the Department of Engineering
Design and Manufacture, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya
(UM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He holds a Master of Science in the
mechanical engineering from University of Tehran, Iran.